A list of 10 Things for Friday

1. Morning meditation for people who don’t meditate (taken from Tim Ferriss)

- Avoid any electronics.
- Sit erect. I do this on a bench outside my local coffeeshop. Tim uses a floor pillow against a wall. 
- Choose one song to listen to. It might take some time to find your song. Tims is Prince - 1999, mine, Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place
- For the length of the song, close your eyes and breathe. Tim likes to imagine breathing in a green light. I thought this was weird until I tried it, my “energy light” is blue. 
- While you are breathing, run down a list of things you are grateful for.

2. Pictures, no matter how unrelated, will make it more likely people will read your writing.

The pecking order: 
1. Cute animals (Cats, shiba inus, sloths then everything else.)
2. Food you should not eat on a daily basis. 
3. Insanely beautiful people. Women must have underboob/underbutt. Men must have beards. Bonus for men: holding a baby.

3. Money is a ridiculously abundant commodity.

It’s like salt. I could turn to the girl right next to me at this coffeeshop and sell her everything I had on me for $5.00. It would not be smart, but I would find myself with $5.00.

4. This means for creative people, one must not waste time doing jobs just for money. 

It is like doing a first hit of a drug. Before you know it, you will spiral and binge on creating shitty work for that pay-high (because any quality job understands the value of creatives.) It will be harder to land the quality jobs you want because all you have is shitty work in your portfolio. Pay-high or high-pay?

5. There will be the occasional job that is a mixture of great people, great ideas and a small budget. 

The key phrase you need to burn into your mind and articulate at those meetings: “The less money you have, the more creative control I get.”

6. If you are interested in designing fashion but are feeling discouraged by others.

If you feel that it is not a valuable, worthwhile pursuit, remember that even those that claim they don’t care about fashion dress a certain way for work. Fashion is clothes, and clothes are culture. Do not confuse this with the culture of fashion. The drama, the peacocks and the parties one associates with fashion are like digital effects in films. They are used by certain people to distract from a lack of depth. (And once you know what to look out for, its so easy to tell when things are fake.)

7. To be taken seriously, one must stop being apologetic.

“I like your shirt.”
“Oh, this? I found it for $15 at a store. Sorry I didn’t get any sleep and couldn’t figure out what to wear.”

“Tell me about your work.”
“Oh, this piece. I was really rushed and got stuck creatively.”

Go on a first date. Start off by telling the girl how sorry you are that you aren’t the type of guy she’s used to dating. She’s going to believe you. Forever alone.

8. A creatives job is to organize the obvious into the unobivious. 

Which is then interpreted as obvious by apologist who wish they created it, if only.

Writers organize words we use every day into sentences to create stories. Fashion Designers organize garments, colors, shapes into collections. Chefs organize different foods to create dishes.

Do not assume though that you are not creative because you don’t “do something artistic”.

Managers organize people to get tasks done. Nutritionists organize information and food into meal plans to help people optimize their health.

Everyone applies this method of organizing the obvious into the unobvious daily. We are reframing.

9. The solution to stop being apologetic, then, is to reframe. 

The shirt isn’t cheap, you have a knack for finding beautiful things everywhere. Your work wasn’t rushed, you’re just really good at tight deadlines. You are a breath of fresh air for a girl that’s been breathing in smog the past 5 years.

10. Sorry, I ran out of things to write about. 
[Reframe] Or maybe I’m just being clever.

About Last Week

A month and a half ago, my father suffered a stroke. He is partially blind, with no peripheral vision. His breathing has suffered too from the decades of smoking. His gasps for air between sentences sound literally like final breaths. The kind you hear in war films from a fallen soldier, fighting death. Because my father is slowly dying.

A month later my mother calls me to tell me she's going in for surgery for a tumor. After removing part of it, they decided that she required chemotherapy for the next 6 months.

That was five days ago.

And then Boston happened.

And then we lose background checks for gun purchases.

Texas explosion. The ricin incident. Strawberry Worker Shootings in Greece.

And then Boston part 2. Streaming at me constantly last night through my phone.

The easy thing would be to believe my world is falling apart.

It seems that way.

We are all relieved it is over and tell ourselves to never forget what happened.

We remember. Sort of.

In everyone, there was a brief moment where your daily problems ceased to exist. The subway singers you found so annoying are making you happy. The screaming kids at the coffee shop you do your work at tuned out from your hearing range. You pick up your phone and tell your girlfriend you love her in the middle of the designs a client is pestering you about.

I've seen this movie before. Person learns they've got terminal cancer and a shift takes place in their psyche. They are suddenly aware of what really matters.

Faced with death, all of our assumptions are called into question.

Am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Am I living right? Have I found love in my life? Do people feel loved by me? Am I happy? Is this what I want my last memories to be?

And this is the part we forget, because our "terminal cancer" goes into remission. We go back to our regularly scheduled lives.

Our fears, anxieties, self-doubts of our careers, love life, purpose flood back. We distract ourselves with the trivial news of other peoples nipple slipping out on television, as if it affects us on a deep level.

Because it's fun. It's engineered that way. And in the same way junk food looks and feels like food, these distractions look and feel like problems.

As we all settle down and try to understand the motives of the suspects in the next few days, I will put my money on one thing. Like you and I, the bombers had fears, anxieties, self-doubts of their lives and place in this world. The fear won. It beat them. To contribute to this world, a world that is often highly critical and seemingly unforgiving, takes courage, hard work and endless heart. What is more frightening than believing you are irrelevant, weak and out of place? Remember that really annoying kid in your 7th grade classroom that couldn't stop getting in trouble? How do you think he felt?

My purpose in writing this isn't to give the bombers excuses, but to crush any of those that you might have regarding your own life and purpose.

Do not forget what happened last week. Do not forget the questions you began asking yourself about your place and priorities.

We are only free to the extent of our own self-mastery. Do not let fear and self-doubt win.

Those who can not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.